Vault Cortex is a feature-complete, well-engineered third-party MCP server for Obsidian: hybrid search (FTS5 + vectors + reranking, all local), entry-granular structured memory, Kanban-aware tasks, attachment file reading, and full OAuth 2.1 with data-integrity safeguards — rare depth in this category. It is not official (the author is not the Obsidian team), but it is MIT-licensed, easy to deploy in one Docker container, and ships a CLI wizard. Best suited to serious Obsidian users comfortable with self-hosting.
Vault Cortex is a standalone MCP server that gives any AI agent hybrid search, task management, structured memory, and read/write access to an Obsidian vault. No plugins and no running Obsidian required: one Docker container works directly with the .md files on disk. Deploy on a VPS with Obsidian Sync to access the same vault from a phone, claude.ai, or any remote MCP client, secured with OAuth 2.1. Search combines FTS5 keyword matching and vector semantic similarity via RRF fusion, refined by a cross-encoder reranker. The memory layer holds dated, append-only entries; the task layer parses both Tasks plugin emoji and Dataview inline-field formats with Kanban lane awareness; file tools read images, canvases, PDFs, and other non-markdown files. Transport is streamable-http (http://localhost:8000/mcp or <PUBLIC_URL>/mcp).
Requires Docker (or Podman, OrbStack, etc.); the CLI needs Node.js >= 20.12. Local: run npx vault-cortex@latest init — the wizard picks your vault path, generates the auth token and config, starts the server, and prints the URL (http://localhost:8000/mcp). Remote: on a VPS run npx vault-cortex@latest init --mode remote with an Obsidian Sync subscription. Manual docker compose setup is also available (image ghcr.io/aliasunder/vault-cortex). Connect Claude Code: claude mcp add --scope user --transport http vault-cortex http://localhost:8000/mcp.